The Problem with Sportswriting

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Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.

— Janet Malcolm

Writers are always selling someone out.

— Joan Didion

Don’t ever make a friend in this business, you’re only going to have to fuck somebody in the end.

— Jim Murray

1.The open secret about Grantland Rice, America’s ur-sportswriter and the namesake of Bill Simmons’s omnibus sports/pop culture website, is this: he wasn’t a very good writer. He wrote a lot, and so was ubiquitous. His personal record, as recorded in Frank Deford’sOver Time: My Life as a Sportswriter, amounted to 50,000 words over the nine days of the 1912 World Series. Rice labored, Deford tells us, under a 3,500-word daily quota over his 53-year career.

With some 17 million words to choose from, it’s not really possible to say whether the lead to his story on the 1924 Army-Notre Dame football game is the “best” thing Rice ever wrote, only that it’s the most quoted:

Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as Famine, Pestilence, Destruction and Death. These are only aliases. Their real names are Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley, and Layden.

As a young sportswriter aiming at literature, I was under the impression that Rice had a bead on the target. He was the first capital-S Sportswriter, the first commentator-as-personality. He was popular, but not because he was a good writer. As Deford puts it in his memoir:

Perhaps the idea was to make mere games seem more important or artistic, but for whatever reason the writing grew more florid and rococo… Jonathan Yardley… wrote that old-time sportswriting was “like a bad dream by Sir Walter Scott.”

In Rice’s defense, it’s probably not possible to publish 17 million words and not engage in a certain amount of linguistic inflation. But that inflation has plagued the profession ever since, and it’s evident in each of the books considered here. In fact, I will now posit a corollary to Godwin’s Law, which holds that: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.”

Stockman’s Corollary: as a sportswriter’s career progresses, the probability that he will needlessly invoke Nazis also approaches one. The “needlessly” goes without saying, or should. But each of the three writers here — Jim Murray, the daily journalist; Frank Deford, the magazine feature writer; and John Feinstein, the bestelling author — eventually invokes some aspect of the Hitler war machine.

Jim Murray was 4F in World War II and so spent the war scrambling up the ladder in his early newspaper gigs. As Ted Geltner assures us in Last King of the Sports Page: The Life and Career of Jim Murray — his biography of the Los Angeles Times columnist who, at the peak of his popularity, was syndicated in more than 200 newspapers — Murray tried more than once to sign up, but Uncle Sam wouldn’t let him.

In 1963, in advance of the first Sonny Liston–Cassius Clay fight, Murray predicted that the bout would “be the most popular fight since Hitler and Stalin — 180 million Americans rooting for a double knockout.” OK, pretty mild and pretty funny. And, Geltner argues, a representation of the two fighters’ general unpopularity with the establishment. But, after Clay’s conversion to Islam — and name-change to Muhammad Ali, which Murray waited more than a decade to honor in print — Murray compared Ali’s Fruit of Islam bodyguards to “the Gestapo in blackface.” Which is pretty gratuitous, and not a little racist.

But let’s give Murray the old “man-of-his-time” pass — his was a jauntily jingoistic generation, one that for all its faults produced the indisputably good outcome of stopping Hitler — and move on to Frank Deford.

You may best recognize the genteel Deford as the honeyed voice behind more than 1,500 sports commentaries on NPR’s Morning Edition. Throughout Over Time, his memoir of working for Sports Illustrated and other national outlets, he manages to keep a healthy perspective. “I can’t for the life of me, for example, imagine that any run-of-the-mill young person will want to read the old stuff I’m writing about now.” This he tells us once we’re more than a third of the way through a bunch of the old stuff.

Deford, too, falls victim to Stockman’s Corollary, with a throwaway line in a paragraph about how he works best by himself: “I just can’t grasp how two people could write something well together — collaboration, they call it, which always makes me think of weasels collaborating with the Nazis. I guess you have to have the right personality to be collaborative.” That’s right, you have to be Lieber/Stoller or Marshal Petain.

But among the writers under review, John Feinstein — avatar of conventional wisdom, perpetrator of sub-competent prose — takes the cake (as he might say) for not only fulfilling the corollary, but being the biggest hypocrite.

Early in One on One: Behind the Scenes with the Greats in the Game, the author’s bloated account of his various publishing successes, Feinstein shows himself standing up to Bobby Knight. This was during Feinstein’s reporting of his book A Season on the Brink, for which he spent the 1985-1986 season as an embedded reporter with Knight’s Indiana University men’s basketball team. That book was a wild success — and Feinstein dedicates a full 150 pages or more to its development and publication.

Feinstein was about three weeks into his “Bloomington sojourn” when Knight fired off a quintessentially crass crack at the reporter in front of his team: “‘You know, John,’ Knight said. ‘There are times when I’m not sure that Hitler wasn’t right about you people.’” Not funny at all, but then Knight is a dirtbag who choked his players, so this sort of crack seems entirely in character. Feinstein explains that he didn’t confront Knight in front of his team, because the coach would only have escalated things and refused to back down. So Feinstein waited until later than night:

…Knight and I were again in the car en route to a speech, and it was just the two of us.

“I gotta say something to you,” I finally said. “Because if I don’t I won’t be able to sleep tonight.”

“What is it?” he asked.

“I think you know I have no problem with you making jokes about me being Jewish or liberal or whatever,” I said.

“In fact, you’re really good about it,” Knight said.

“I think so,” I went on. “But I gotta tell you, Bob. Hitler wasn’t funny. Not on any level.”

Fair enough, and true enough, and Knight backs down and comes as close as a solipsistic asshole can come to apologizing. But the reason I quote that scene at length is not to show that Feinstein was a man of principle — possibly endangering his unprecedented access to this hothead basketball coach to rebuke him for a crass remark — but to show instead that he can be breathtakingly un-self-aware, not to mention a hypocrite.

In this case, 350 pages after he’s admonished Knight, he tells us about an incident at the Los Angeles Open golf tournament in which “the people in charge of security had tried to tell Larry Dorman of the New York Times and I that we couldn’t walk inside the ropes without a camera, even though we were wearing armbands that said, ‘media—inside the ropes access.’” This was eventually sorted out, but Feinstein “ended up telling the guy in charge that he and his men were a bunch of ‘brown-shirted Gestapo stormtroopers.”

You know, to smooth things over.

In light of this newly-discovered corollary, every sportswriter would do well to read the letter Jackie Robinson sent Jim Murray. They were friends, and, despite his early animosity toward Ali, Murray had lobbied to get Satchel Paige (who spent most of his career in the Negro Leagues) into baseball’s Hall of Fame and the PGA player Charlie Sifford into the Masters golf tournament. But, when Murray invoked Robinson’s name in a column that derided the efforts of some civil rights activists to get African American Olympians to boycott the 1968 Summer Games in Mexico City — and compared the boycott, in passing, to Hitler’s insults of black athletes in 1936 — Robinson wrote an eloquent rebuke, the final clause of which should be stamped on every sportswriter’s laptop: “Olympics occur periodically. Justice must be practiced every day, and none of this has the faintest relationship to Hitler.”

2.
The most infuriating thing about Feinstein’s book, aside from its reading like a first draft (he tells us of someone’s disease that was “degenerative and kept getting worse,” or of the 1986 World Series: “People forget that the score was tied at that moment. …Buckner did not lose the World Series for the Red Sox, a fact many, many people forget.”), is his utter lack of perspective.

This is a sportswriter’s problem generally — great ones like Deford and Murray often transcend it. Feinstein almost never does. It’s not coincidental that Feinstein dropped the “brown-shirted Gestapo” line on a security guard (which is not even accurate: the Brown Shirts and the Gestapo were two different groups), he loathes security guards. There are no fewer than six instances in this book of Feinstein’s confrontation with gatekeepers at various venues.

An example, taken almost at random, emphasis mine:

I’ve had bad experiences with security guards around the world, but never more so than in Chapel Hill. Once, when I walked over before a game to say hello to Dean Smith, one of them started pushing me away until Dean saw what was going on and waved the guard off. Rather than just let me go as he had been instructed to do, the guard — who had to be a hundred — said, “You’re lucky Coach Smith was here.”

To which I replied — always calm when confronted — “You’re lucky I didn’t knock you into the fifth row.”

It’s a stunning failure of empathy. It doesn’t occur to Feinstein that this low-paid senior citizen was just doing his job — keeping people off the court. Furthermore, there’s a tincture of “don’t you know who I am?” in this reaction, and that’s what really grates.

Because, consider: what if Tiger Woods had done that? Or Kobe Bryant? Feinstein would be one of the first baying hounds on Charlie Rose to tell us that these athletes don’t know how good they’ve got it and they don’t care how many little people they step on, and that if it weren’t for the fans they’d be nobodies. Someone might remind Feinstein that if it weren’t for the security guards keeping everyone else out while he gets unrestricted access to players and coaches, he might not have a career.

In his way, Feinstein is a sort of modern Grantland Rice. He’s prolific (Deford calls him “‘the Woody Allen of sportswriting,’ because, just as Allen annually produces a new movie, so too does John somehow manage to write a major book almost every year,” which is a backhanded compliment if I’ve ever seen one). He’s also a hypocrite. Rice admitted that he wanted to build his subjects into heroes (see, for instance, the aforementioned “four horsemen” of Notre Dame’s backfield). And yet Rice also decried the perverting influence of money on athletics — money which had entered the game thanks in no small part to his mythmaking.

Late in this book — perhaps he figures no one will read this far; I didn’t want to — Feinstein admits to outright hypocrisy: “Since eleven years have passed, I can now reveal that for all the complaining I’ve done… about game times being changed for TV, I was responsible for a game time being changed…” Feinstein was researching his book The Last Amateurs, on The Patriot League, a scholarship-free, NCAA Division I athletic conference. Basically, he wanted to attend two games on a certain Saturday, one was at noon, one was at two p.m., and the venues were two-and-a-half hours apart. So, he asked the Holy Cross athletic director to change the time of its game with Lehigh. And, because Feinstein was by this time a perennial bestselling author whose book was sure to give the Patriot League and its schools unpurchasable publicity, the two teams acquiesced, and Feinstein — the reporter who was observing a typical season in the Patriot League — got his way. “You should be ashamed of what you did,” an assistant women’s basketball coach tells him. “I wasn’t ashamed and it was well worth the effort.”

Worth it for whom? I wonder. This is the heart of Feinstein’s hypocrisy. On one hand, he tells us that a young Andre Agassi reminded him of a “young Tiger Woods… everything he did was with one thing in mind: how will this affect my ability to make money.” On the other hand, the use of his heavyweight reputation to push around a couple of small-conference athletics programs leaves his conscience undisturbed. I wonder if that schedule change affected his ability to make money?

Deford, who left Sports Illustrated in the early ‘90s to head up the all-sports newspaper The National (an oral history of which can be found at Grantland), made Feinstein his first hire in that ill-fated endeavor. And yet, he has a refreshing candor about certain aspects of his profession: “Besides, everybody genially accepts that a considerable portion of popular American sports — college football and men’s basketball — is an outright fraud…” It’s unfortunate that this passes for a bracing assertion in sportswriting, but it does. Deford qualifies this by referring to himself in another context as “the piano player in the whorehouse.”

In this he’s more in line with Jim Murray — who, Geltner claims, was Deford’s first target hire for The National; Murray turned him down. Murray admitted near the end of his career: “I covered the circus. I felt privileged to have done so. …Sure, I helped keep the hype going, the calliope playing. I can live with that. It’s what I am.”

Both Deford and Geltner tell of that calliope player at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, when Magic Johnson interrupted a brusque official to say “The great Jim Murray is here, and he didn’t get to ask a question.”

John Feinstein would kill for that kind of recognition. Literally, I mean. He would kill seven security guards. But no, Murray and Deford possess a self-awareness about their professions that Feinstein does not. That is, that the most interesting stuff in the sports world has to do with its stories, not its scores.

I would like to say that all sports fans know that, but we do not. For evidence, I turn to the letters page of the July 30 Sports Illustrated. One C. Fred Bergsten from Annandale, Va. has written in to respond to a book excerpt the magazine ran on that 1992 Dream Team. Here’s the letter:

With all the hype of the 20th anniversary of the Dream Team… most fans are forgetting that there were two squads, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, that could have given the Dream Team a run for its money had their countries not dissolved just before the Barcelona Games. The Soviets were the defending gold medalist from the 1988 Games, and Yugoslavia was the ’90 FIBA world champion. It is a tragedy that colossal matchups among the three basketball superpowers never occurred in ’92.

Yes, the tragedy of the Yugoslavian civil war was not Srebrenica, it was that the reigning FIBA champs didn’t get a shot at the Dream Team.

Let’s close with a proper world-historical perspective. As Danny Boyle’s History of Britain tableau unfolded at the Opening Ceremonies of our present Olympics, as the workers of the Industrial Revolution literally rolled up the sod of pastoral England, I was put in mind of lines the truly great columnist Red Smith wrote the last time London hosted the games, in 1948 — and in the aftermath of, y’know, actual Nazis.

But, writing of those Opening Ceremonies 64 years ago, Red Smith both described them and put them in perspective:

The torchbearer dashed up into the stands, brandished his torch on high and dropped it into a tall concrete bird bath…

The crowd made with the tonsils. It was hokum. It was pure Hollywood. But it was good. You had to like it.

Sebastian Stockman
, a former sportswriter, teaches in the First Year Writing Program at Emerson College, in Boston. He's written for The Kansas City Star, The Rumpus, Library Journal, and other outlets. He lives in Cambridge, Mass., with his wife and daughter. Follow him on twitter @substockman.

I originally thought I wouldn't write about the Publishers WeeklyTop 10 Books of 2009, a list that quickly became infamous not for who's on it, but who isn't. Namely: women. I noticed the absence immediately, but I was more puzzled than troubled. Come on, PW, have you not read Nothing Right by Antonya Nelson? This year, readers and critics have gone gaga for lady authors, from Hillary Mantel to Jayne Anne Phillips, and so it was strange that none would be included on the list. It didn't seem like these editors would have to consciously choose a woman--it would just happen, like breathing. Perhaps I'm naive, or I just like lady authors too much.
I was happy to see Await Your Replyby Dan Chaon and Big Machineby Victor LaValle included, two novels I liked a lot and have championed here on The Millions. But, I also felt sad for these two wonderful writers: would they want to be associated with this list? Chaon and LaValle certainly deserve our attention, but the kind of attention they got from PW, I fear, is a reminder that they use the men's room. See, that's what's happened: the maleness of the list is all people can talk about. A cynical part of me wonders if Publishers Weekly went with these picks precisely because of the outrage they were sure would follow. Nothing increases visibility--and web traffic--like outrage.
Lizzie Skurnick'stake on the list is compelling and worth a read; she writes about the topic with both perspicacity and good humor, and she (rightfully, I think) suggests that the term "ambitious"-- as it's defined by critics and prize judges--is questionable, partially because it is gendered. Like Skurnick, I also don't find the list of notable books by women on the Women in Literature and Literary Arts (WILLA) website all that helpful, either. The wiki nature of the list means that the only requirement to get on this list is that you don't use the men's room. You see, women write good books, and they also write very bad ones. One's gender, like one's ethnicity, isn't a sign of your literary merit or lack thereof. And anyway, ladies don't really need this list. We're doing pretty well for ourselves. After all, women read more than men, and women writers sell more books than male writers. And we do win prizes. Don't forget that this year's Nobel prize winner for literature was female, and that Elizabeth Strout won the Pultizer. In 2004, all of the National Book Award nominees for fiction were female. I remember my annoyance at how much gender was discussed that year. "What about the books themselves?" I kept crying. But, look at me now, lamenting that only sausages got invited to the Top 10 Publishers Weekly party.
My double standard, I suppose, comes from the fact that there's a long and undeniable history of women not getting critical recognition for their writing. I read nearly equal numbers of male and female writers (I keep a record. Seriously.) but I've met numerous male readers (many of them booksellers), who rarely, if ever, read books by women. This argument also extends to work by writers of color. Books by white men are considered universal, while books by women, or people of color, aren't. A male author wins a prize because he deserves it. A Latina woman wins a literary prize because, well... there was pressure... it was time. That's a dangerous and unfair line of reasoning, for it undercuts the talent and accomplishment of these writers.
Edward P. Jones won the Pulitzer for The Known World, not because he's a black dude, but because he wrote an exceptional, brilliant novel. Yes, by giving Jones the prize, the Pulitzer committee championed and validated a narrative about African-Americans, by an African-American, and that is significant. But the writer's race was not the reason he won the prize.
Which brings me to why I'm writing about this when I figured I wouldn't. Last week, the National Book Award winners were announced, and all of them were white men. You might expect me to be upset by this, but I wasn't. A few people I follow on Twitter were, however, and on her blog, author Tayari Joneswrote a genuine and heartfelt reaction to the awards (she attended the ceremony): "I will admit that I don't know what to make of it. I know how it felt to be a woman writer of color that evening. I had a number of weirdly marginalizing personal encounters that evening. I arrived in high spirits and left feeling a bit deflated." This reaction makes a lot of sense to me, and I respect it. But it also must be acknowledged that the judging process was fair--or as fair as can be (Jones does acknowledge this in her post).
The judges for each genre--fiction, nonfiction, poetry and young people's literature--don't talk to one another. That is, if the fiction judges choose a white male writer to win, they don't know that the nonfiction judges have as well. Furthermore, the list of nominated books was varied and interesting, and the judges were diverse. (Quite frankly, I'd read anything deemed the best by fiction committee Jennifer Egan, Junot Díaz, Charles Johnson, Lydia Millet and Alan Cheuse.) So I'm all right with the results this year, as discomfiting as they might have been, coming on the heels of that terrible PW list. (And, perhaps it's worth reiterating: do we even need the prizes? Do we need to "put a ring on it" so to speak?)
I'm most weary of lamenting this year's National Book Award winners because it sets up an expectation for next year's winners to be chosen on the basis of something other than literary merit. And if a woman and/or person of color wins the award, the last thing I want to hear is, "Oh, the judges felt pressure," or, "It was time..." That kind of discourse is insidious.
In a dream world, the winners and best-of lists would always be diverse and surprising, and equality would just happen because people read widely, without any ingrained, problematic notions of what's universal or ambitious or important. Now, the question is: how can we make that a reality?

Anyone who has diligently read my Millions posts over the years (and I know you're out there, somewhere) will know that I'm drawn to stories written by or about immigrants, whether it's Mavis Gallant as the ex-pat Canadian writer in Paris writing about European post-war dislocation, Goran Simic writing in his adopted home of Canada about Sarajevo in the 90s, Rawi Hage, also in his adopted country Canada writing about the streets of Beirut in the 80s, or Michael Ondaatje returning to his Sri Lankan roots to write about the generations that came before him.So I'm more than a little embarrassed to confess that until about five minutes ago, I hadn't realized that the three readings I attended a few weeks ago at the Toronto International Authors Festival could also be linked by this same theme. I've already written about Sarah Vowell on the Puritan immigrants to the Massachusetts Bay colony in the 1630s, and then Junot Díaz, together with Rawi Hage, speaking of the experience of being immigrant authors writing about immigrant families in modern cosmopolitan North America.The third reading I attended was by Amitav Ghosh, the Calcutta-born writer who, in a little over fifty years has also lived in Sri Lanka, Delhi, Goa, Egypt, Britain, and the United States, where he lives part of the year with his American wife. A multiple emigre with an admitted sense of dislocation, he's the first in fourteen generations to marry outside his Bengali home district. He has spent a lifetime writing about dislocation and displacement, with their resultant sense of loss, but also with their capacity for opportunity.Ghosh spoke with CBC Radio's Eleanor Wachtel for well over an hour on his extraordinary life and on his latest novel, Sea of Poppies. The interview was recorded and edited down to 45 minutes for Wachtel's Writers & Co. radio show. A few quotes and observations:On the Maoist insurgency in Calcutta during his boyhood, on the upheaval around him: it was "formative to see places that are convulsed." On the anti-Hindu riots of 1964, as hundreds of Hindus took refuge at the Ghosh family compound, Ghosh says that "because there were so many people, you don't feel that palpable threat."From age nine to eleven, he lived in Sri Lanka; with its beaches it proved to be "a kind of wonderland" for young Amitav. But even as a child, he sensed that "normal is never normal," and with the ethnic strife he was aware of "tectonic plates shifting underneath." This led to an interesting sidebar on the false assumption of security that many people have. When something horrific like 9/11 happens, Ghosh continues, those with that mindset tend to swing to overreaction.College in Delhi was "intellectually stimulating," more so than the time he would later spend learning and teaching at Oxford and Harvard. Ghosh went on to live in Egypt in the 1980s which led to a discussion on India's forgotten relationships: with Egypt, with China. India attempted and failed at one time to rebuild bridges between cultures whose relationships were interrupted by colonialism.On his beloved Indian ocean, Ghosh affirmed his affection for the "multiplicity of it." Every part of it is different - Calcutta from Madras from Burma from Mauritius. On the repression in Burma, Ghosh believes that "politics is not capable of devouring the entirety of life," so even in an oppressive Burma, friendships, and a life outside of the political reality, can form and flourish.His latest novel, Sea Of Poppies, is the first part of a proposed trilogy, and deals with indentured migrant workers in the 1830s, replacing African slaves after the abolition of the slave trade. They were poppy growers during the Opium Wars. Ghosh spoke of the roots of the wars: China, due to mass-addiction, bans the importation of opium; consequently Britain goes to war to reinstate the "free-trade" of opium. This led to Ghosh musing rhetorically: "How is it free if governments wage a war to enhance the trade?"Ghosh commented that portions of the novel - bits of dialogue - are written in a kind of pidgin English. He comments that "as writers, language is the equivalent of a mise-en-scene." It serves many purposes, one of them being as "white noise," rather than to communicate information. Consequently, there's no need to understand every word, no need to decode the pidgin English.And Ghosh also commented that there are few narratives of departure among immigrant writers. Most tend to write about the life of arrival, rather than the life of leaving.

12 comments:

I appreciate the observations about Feinstein and Deford, and sportswriting in general, and also sports. I actually thought the quote at the end about the 1992 Dream Team was interesting on a sports level, which could prove the point of the article.

Did you get cut off? There was a compelling and important point about sportswriters brewing and then…

The main question I have, and maybe this is one that didn’t really come up as part of this piece’s drafting and is, as a result, unfair and pot-shotty, but: are we really supposed to care about sportswriters not being good, well, writers? It just seems like the discussion of sportswriters and how insufferable they are has started to oddly shift from them being buffoons, (a conversation that can only go on for so long and be had so often), to them being bad writers. As if their writing were supposed to hold in it anything artistic.

All kinds of people like sports. These people like to hear different types of stories on sports. Some demand Pulitzer quality reporting and/or fiction, while others love schlock and everything in between.

Feinstein is bad because he can turn the most exciting sports stories into dreary puddles of cold oatmeal. “A Good Walk Spoiled”? How about “A Good Afternoon Ruined”?

On the other hand, Grantland Rice reads like an NFL film. What’s so bad about that?

The criticism of sports writing here is warranted entirely because some sports writers (not all) take themselves so seriously. Florid prose setting up dramatic moments. And because there’s such a cult around sports and sportswriting. The sportswriter as scribe of life, of cataloger of all tragedy and triumph — which is why the Hitler metaphor is such a perfect thing to take sports writers to task for. Like … c’mon. It’s a game, not a concentration camp. It’s an approach that warrants some potshots. And this piece earned them.

I just re-read THE PROFESSIONAL by WC Heinz. Stockman’s Feinstein reminded me a lot of the aging sports writer that comes in at the end of the book, the entitled, over-the-hill guy everyone has to bow to. Which is how we view a lot of sports writers with pedigrees. Well done.

I would concur that the author’s comment seeming to admonish the SI letter writer for a lack of perspective is a bit unfair. Maybe the use of “tragedy” was unfortunate, given the context behind the dissolution of the Yugoslavian national team. I don’t think the writer intends to ignore that historical reality though, he’s just making a limited point about the strength of the Soviet and Yugoslavian teams prior to the breaking apart of those nations. If the letter was in response to a Newsweek article about ethnic genocide in Serbia or Bosnia, I’d certainly agree that the writer lacked perspective, but in response to an SI piece about the dream team, I don’t see the problem in bringing up the fact that the full Soviet and Yugoslavian teams were pretty talented and would have provided the Dream Team better competition than Croatia, Lithuania, and Russia did after dissolution.

Feinstein is an utter fraud. The worst kind of human. His past successes have been few but notable — hard to deny that A Season on The Brink was a groundbreaking work, and A Good Walk Spoiled has its merits. There’s some justice in the fact that he’s an absolute nobody now, baying into the abyss on some satellite radio talk show and maintaining a laughably unvisited personal blog. His books are an embarrassment at this point – just rehashes of stories he’s told a million times already (and that he probably mostly made up).

Authors are writing from a networked world and seeing life through that lens whether they allow it to their characters or not. So why not embrace it? Why not make it matter, because it already does however much we doth protest?

A few weeks ago, in the The New York Observer, Nina Burleighthrew down the notion that the enormous success of Junot Díaz’sThis Is How You Lose Her is undeserved. Díaz is beloved not because he is a great writer, Burleigh argues, but because Díaz is a man, and a man who delights us with tales about dashing players and their hapless women victims.
Is it the wars, the terrorism, the recession, driving the longing for a regenerated machismo that Mr. Díaz’s multi-culti cred makes acceptable again? Is it a feminist backlash?...Mr. Díaz’s wondrous bewitching of prize committees comes at a time when women writers remain wildly underrepresented in publishing, on both the reviewing and the reviewed side.
And on Twitter, multiple women writers I respect and admire, like Roxane Gay and Elliot Holt gave Díaz his due, but went on to say that Díaz’s style of confessional writings about love would not fly, if written by a woman.
Normally, I’d be all over this kind of thing. I love talking about the lack of gender equity in publishing (in fact, I did for Bitch Magazine this summer). But I can’t agree that Díaz’s success is gender-based; because yes Díaz is a man, but he’s also a man of color. Critics who say that Díaz would not receive the same warmth, if he was a woman, are overlooking the factor of race.
The VIDA statistics that count the number of women’s bylines versus men’s in prestigious magazines are undeniable: in the last two years, in the publications surveyed, only one-quarter to one-third of bylines went to women. There is no parallel count for writers of color, (anybody want to start one?) though we can count prizes. Since 1917, a total of four men of color have won the Pulitzer: N. Scott Momaday, Oscar Hijuelos, Edward P. Jones, and Junot Díaz. Thirty women have won the Pulitzer, almost half of them condensed in the last 30 years, and three of those women were women of color. Since 1950 two men of color have won a National Book Award in Fiction (Ralph Ellison and Ha Jin), and 16 women have won an NBA, one of them a woman of color. And these numbers are reflected in MFA programs and at writing conferences. For example, I had the great fortune of attending an MFA program with close numbers of men and women, though gender parity did vary from year to year. But over the three years that I attended the program, I can count only seven men of color, and 12 women of color, probably out of about 150 students.* While no stats on gender and race exist for MFA programs, I don’t think that my program was out of the norm. Even at VONA, the annual Bay Area writing conference for writers of color -- where, I should disclose, I took a workshop with Junot Díaz in 2007 -- the number of women attendees outstrips the number of men. I’m not trying to say that publishing isn’t difficult for women; I’m simply trying to say that it ain’t easy for men of color either.
However. I don’t need to dazzle you with depressing numbers to make my case. I could just point out the fact that in our culture, the stereotypes associated with men of color don’t exactly make room for the kind of insight, expressiveness, and artsyness we associate with writers. Instead, these stereotypes expect men of color, particularly African American men and Latino men, to be hypermasculine and violent, and little else. They expect East Asian men, South Asian men and Arab men to be computer nerds, cab drivers, or terrorists, and not poets; Native American men are expected to be drunk.
It surprises me that only a few months after we were all wearing hoodies for Trayvon Martin, we can overlook the fact that race is a terrifyingly high obstacle for men of color. Of course, some of the greatest wordsmiths, storytellers and social historians of our time have to come to us through hip hop -- like Big L, Biggie, Jay-Z or your preferred MC of choice -- but thanks to the racialized wariness that often meets hip hop in the mainstream, you will rarely hear these men of color described adoringly by the arbiters of literary culture.
While I emphatically agree that gender is a barrier in publishing, taking out our sense of injustice on men of color is barking up the wrong tree. It would make more sense for us to think about how the barriers we face are parallel, and to try working on the unfairness in publishing together.
But Nina Burleigh aside, what really struck in the craw of my Twitter feed is not the fact that Junot Díaz is a man, period, but rather that he is a man who is being rewarded for writing love stories about characters who are mysteriously close to himself. The argument runs that women aren’t allowed to write about love, especially not in a confessional way -- unless they want to get shelved under “Chick Lit” instead of “Prize Winners.” This holds more water for me. Still, I can think of multiple women writers who write about love and their own lives -- and who gracefully demonstrate the impact of gender on their love and their lives -- just as Díaz does. Like Mary Gaitskill, for example. Or Alice Munro. (There is even a biography of Alice Munro that charts how much her stories overlap with her own life.) It is no coincidence that Gaitskill, Munro, and Díaz all write stories that are so innovative, heart-breaking, and thrilling that they dwarf those of their contemporaries. While it is hard for anyone to write a good story, and harder still to get that good story published, more often than not people who are marginalized have to perform at a higher level than the norm in any field, to overcome the bias that might otherwise count them out.
And to call Junot Díaz’s stories “love stories” seems a little tongue in cheek. They are more like unlove stories: they chronicle one Dominican American man’s inability to overcome the patriarchal expectations on himself, which he then turns on the women in his life, leading to eventual bleak and total emotional isolation. (Could Díaz be addressing those expectations of hypermasculinity; the ones that also make it hard for men of color to be seen as artists?)
Going on what Díaz admits about his personal life, the stories may be confessional, but they aren’t masturbatory or without purpose; instead they manage to maintain that almost impossible balance between beautiful writing, and politics. A quick read of stories like “The Sun, the Moon, the Stars,” “Alma,” or “The Cheater’s Guide to Love” might yield the belief that Díaz’s character, and Díaz himself, are pigs and misogynists. For sure, some readers I know can’t even get past Yunior’s addiction to ethnic and sexist slurs. While I don’t share the sentiment, I can sympathize with the desire to carve out a space in one’s life that is free from such language, as loaded, painful and constant as it is in our everyday lives.
But I have trouble understanding how a willing and careful reader could miss the fact that almost all of Díaz’s stories are cautionary tales about what happens to men who refuse to lay down their male power, in order to see women as human. When Nina Burleigh says, “Díaz’s alter ego is utterly beholden to his wandering penis, yet never examines his compulsion to bone everyone in sight,” I wonder if we were reading the same book. This is How You Lose Her’s biggest joke, and biggest tragedy is this: Yunior’s thesis is that he’s “not a bad guy,” and yet the tales he tells about himself are merciless in proving the opposite. Yunior may not “examine his compulsion[s]” but the stories do; unflinchingly. Yunior is a bad guy, and his refusal to take responsibility leads him to the worst ending of all by the book’s close: the inability to connect.
Because Díaz’s work is so concerned with masculinity, it is hard for me to imagine “the female Junot Díaz” -- that woman writer who writes just like he does, but doesn’t receive the accolades he does. The fact that Díaz is so uniquely himself as a writer compounds this issue. Does the question work in reverse? Who is the male Mary Gaitskill? The male Alice Munro? (Chekhov, Cynthia Ozick says.) Zadie Smith and ZZ Packer seem like possible counterparts for Díaz -- though their accolades are intact -- for their blend of humor and tragedy and high and low culture, and their investigation of the impact that race, gender and class have on love and family.
For me, the magic of Junot Díaz is that his stories work on more levels than I can keep track of. The way he writes race and gender is radical, but what he does with words is so enchanting that a reader who doesn’t care about race and gender can still be swept away. Among the great gifts of his work is the common space it opens up. Michael Bourne wrote in September that Díaz lets all readers share in his space, whatever their background: “...no matter what racial madness was happening on the page, I as a white reader always felt included among his boys, the ‘you’ in his stories always seemed to include me.” While this is not the point Bourne is trying to make (and you should read his review because his point is more insightful and complex), Díaz’s writing does indeed put the bros at ease, because Díaz is simultaneously critical of machismo, while still being macho. And so conversations about race and gender with white writers or male writers that I would otherwise find stressful, risky, because I am a woman writer of color -- especially if we’re talking about less bro-friendly writers like (God forbid) Alice Walker -- miraculously become open and relaxed, if we’re talking about Yunior. Here Díaz gets to have his cake and eat it too, and that could be what annoys feminist writers. A woman would never get high fives for criticizing the patriarchy; that I can definitely agree with. But. Could I be irritated that we can’t have the same kind of relaxed conversations in the context of Louise Erdrich, Edwidge Danticat, or even Edward P. Jones, because they don’t make the bros feels as safe as Díaz? Sure. But I’m still wildly grateful for that space that fits both me and the literary bros. Seriously, that’s a magic trick and a half.
And yet, this common space can be dangerous, because it’s too easy. If I were to entertain the notion that something other than Díaz’s colossal talent is behind his success, I would guess that prize committees bequeath their approval on Díaz, because a bonus comes from association with him, outside of his cred as a writer.
Loving Díaz can be like slipping Kanye lyrics into conversation or cushioning racist comments with references to your black best friend: it allows white readers a reprieve from white guilt. A fantasy world opens up, where racial difference is elided, and you can be absolved of the crimes associated with white privilege by raving about Junot Díaz, or by giving him a big prize.
Sure, the cynicism behind this sentiment is as ugly as Burleigh’s crass dismissal of Díaz’s worth. But the fact of the matter is that neither my cynicism nor Burleigh’s misplaced anger is going to go away any time soon; not until the landscape of publishing shares more of the power, and lets in the people that it has shut out.
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*The total number of students in my program at any time was 80. The number 150 is a rough guess that includes any students who overlapped with me, and graduated before me, after me or with me.

Like many recovering English majors before me, I have a longstanding infatuation with heavy Russian novels. So on one level, a new edition of Dead Souls seems like a no-brainer: an excuse to return to a story that has endured for nearly two centuries.
Nikolai Gogol’s masterpiece centers on a con man named Chichikov who is literally buying dead souls -- or more accurately, serfs who have died but are still counted on official tax rolls. His journey sweeps through a swath of 19th-century Russian life, as he glides from landowner to landowner, trying to charm and flatter them in an effort to buy as many deceased serfs as possible. The book is smart and funny; it deftly unpacks the social structure of 19th-century Russian life. It says something profound about the dehumanizing effects of buying and selling everything. And it’s the first of the great Russian novels -- predating War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, and all the rest of those weighty tomes that pretentious undergraduates lug around to coffee houses. And that gives it mystique.
But as I sat down to read Donald Rayfield’s new translation of the book, I felt a sensation I didn’t expect -- guilt. I got to thinking about my reading over the past few months, as I’ve hopped from The Radetzky March to Jude the Obscure to Demons to Chekhov’s plays. All of them brilliant, and all of them properly vetted by the relevant authorities. And I realized I don’t want to get in the habit of “checklist reading” -- paging through an old book for no other reason than to say I’ve read it. Ultimately, we live in a consumer society, and it is really easy to let the habits of consumption, the habits of a collector, seep into everything. Even our reading choices.
As Dwight Macdonald pointed out decades ago in his (now ironically canonical) essay “Masscult and Midcult,” “The chief negative aspect is that so far our Renaissance, unlike the original one, has been passive, a matter of consuming rather than creating, a catching up on our reading on a continental scale… We have, in short, become skilled at consuming High Culture when it has been stamped by the proper authorities.” And that’s why I can’t manage to love the classics without reservation. I am afraid that it is far too easy to read them passively -- to get so caught up in their mystique that the words don’t matter. And I fear it would be very easy to get stuck in the books of the past, and miss out on newer ones that might relate more directly to the world as I experience the rest of the day.
For example, David Shields’sReality Hunger, while nowhere near as brilliant as Dead Souls, made a profound impact on how I think about contemporary media. Shields’s book-length essay, which came out about two years ago, is downright dismissive of the traditional novel, announcing, “To write only according to the rules laid down by masterpieces signifies that one is not a master but a pupil.” But, more importantly, it backs up its iconoclasm with a fragmentary style that genuinely captures something about the way people read today. A literary collage that collects fragments (mostly) taken from preexisting works by other writers and then weaves them into a single “manifesto,” it is a genuinely unique work, one that captures something very real about our -- or at least my -- current reading habits.
Engaging with Reality Hunger's bits of text made me more attuned to the way much of my reading -- on Twitter, or just surfing online -- consists of gliding between small bursts of words. Instead of presenting a clean, straightforward argument, Shields makes his case for collage-style writing through accumulation. His fragments build and build, until the reader is able to piece together the argument is his or her own mind. I do the same thing online every day. I read tweets and status updates and blog posts one after another, and eventually, I piece them together in my head to form a coherent view of the world. Shields’s book finally made me aware of something I had done unconsciously for years. This is what literature is supposed to do -- call our attention to the way society or technology or history has shaped us.
Reading matters because of its relationship to thinking. What I love most about books is the way they force the reader to get involved. Unlike other leisure activities, a reader needs to actually participate in the experience. You don’t just turn a book on and enjoy it -- you need to actively engage with the material, not only sorting out the words, but imagining what they describe. The scenes, the characters, the voices: all of it needs to be created inside the reader’s mind. In that way, reading itself is an imaginative act.
I’ve always seen a minor parallel between a reader and a concert musician -- a pianist for example -- just in the sense that both are taking notations written by someone else and bringing them to life. In both cases, the work of art as it exists on paper is mediated by someone else. A reader may follow the cues of the author, she may give every word her full attention, her emotions may stir in exactly the way they were intended to -- but the images and voice she creates in her mind are hers. But they are not only hers -- they are a collaboration between her and the writer. Alone among the arts, reading/writing involves mingling the thoughts of the artist and the audience. In a way, reading is itself a performance.
When a critic like B.R. Myers sniffs at contemporary writing by declaring, “Every new book we read in our brief and busy lives means that a classic is left unread,” I immediately worry that an entire reading life spent rehashing books approved by the proper authorities risks turning a reader (like me) into a perpetual student, someone who treats literature as a way to check off titles on an imaginary syllabus. Someone passive. I worry those images in my head will be subsumed by what I think they’re supposed to be; what a well-known Gogol critic like Vladimir Nabokov thinks they should look like. I worry Dead Souls belongs to so many people, it might never belong to me the way a book really need to. I worry my performance as a reader will borrow to heavy on the performances of others.
And yet I want Gogol’s novel in my head. It remains a profoundly inventive book, with a narrator who comments on the story as it goes along, even to the point of upbraiding the audience:
I apologize. It would seem that a phrase picked up on the streets has slipped from our hero’s lips. What can one do? That’s the situation a writer in Russia finds himself in. Though, if a street word finds its way into a book, it’s not the writer’s fault, it’s the readers’, above all readers in high society: they’re the last people you will hear a decent Russian word from…
Harold Bloom has used the term “canonical strangeness,” and it is precisely an inherent weirdness that makes Dead Souls so hard to give up. Think of a symphony, where a certain movement may repeat in a slightly different key -- the subtle repetitions built into Gogol’s text help build the absurdity, the humor, and the emotional force of his tale. It isn’t very realistic -- life is not so well constructed -- but that’s okay. It gives us an opportunity -- if only an opportunity -- to stand outside our regular way of looking at the world, and perhaps notice something we have been taking for granted.
The strangeness of Dead Souls, its alien subject matter and its realistic-but-not-lifelike narrative structure actually aid a reader’s performance precisely because, when taken on their own terms, they draw attention away from the process of reading the book. They demand so much energy to really follow, to navigate on their own terms, that the reader’s performance becomes, if not unconscious, at least less self-conscious. As soon as I realized that, my guilt about spending so much time immersed in old books began to melt away.
The way to avoid passive reading is to pay attention to what is on the page and engage it as best you can. This matters because reading offers us something quite rare -- a quiet, solitary activity that allows us to clear a little space in our minds. This feels especially true in the context of my own daily habits, which involve spending an extraordinary amount of time online, a decidedly noisy, un-solitary environment that encourages the reader to respond -- through retweeting, commenting, or “liking” -- as opposed to reflecting.
Reality Hunger sticks with me because it made me more sensitive to the noisy media landscape I inhabit almost continuously. The book forced me to read actively by calling attention to just how I was looking at text. Its fragments made the fragments in my head all too obvious. Dead Souls does the opposite. It is quiet and strange and in some respects inaccessible; it uses a plot that doesn’t dwell too much on the rambling pointlessness of daily life; it is set in a past I don’t understand as much as I pretend to. It is the opposite of the tailored, easy-to-digest world of social media. With the right attitude, the right approach, its contrast with today’s fragmentary reading environment can be every bit as valuable as Shields’s effort to engage it.
The key is to take both together -- to avoid getting trapped only reading classics, like Macdonald’s “catch-up” reader, or only reading fragments or bits of text online. The point is not to set up a dichotomy between old and new -- and certainly not between “good” and “bad” approaches to writing or reading. What both Shields, with his contempt for traditional narratives, and Myers, in his contempt for everything else, both miss is that each kind of text -- those grounded in the technology of the present and those insulated from it -- is equally valuable, because it offers the reader a chance to perform (to think) in very different ways. Both matter because a good performer -- good reader -- is one with a lot of range, and the only way to develop that range is to perform as many different kinds of stories as possible.
In conversation, I’m fond of telling people that the difference between a work of art and a mere product is that art ultimately aspires to contemplation, while a product aspires only to consumption. I suppose my anxiety about turning the classics into a checklist stems from my realization that “art” exists only through collaboration between the artist/creator/writer and an audience; that it’s not the work that should aspire to contemplation, but myself. And that, as a reader, that means I need to be willing to work hard. To approach the performance of reading with every bit as much seriousness and effort as I expect the writer to approach the performance of writing. Art can’t exist without an audience to take it seriously.
The wonder of a book like Dead Souls comes from its silence, the way it offers us a calm place to think. But that place is only as valuable as the reader makes it. A calm place to think is only worthwhile if the reader seizes the opportunity to do some thinking. Perhaps it’s not really guilt I fell about the classics but trepidation -- because at the end of the day the classics need to earned. So now, it’s up to me to put in the effort to earn them.